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Photoshop undoing Camera Raw adjustments

New Here ,
Aug 29, 2023 Aug 29, 2023

Hi, I use Photoshop 21.2.2 with Camera Raw 15.5, Mac OS 13.4.1, with a Nikon D800.

 

Problem: I adjust a photo in Camera Raw to how I like it then click Open to open in Photoshop. 9/10 times the colours are borked. Everything is either too dark, too washed out, or too red. I have no idea why as I did not touch the default settings.

 

Attached is screenshot showing the problem. Left image is Camera Raw, adjusted, where the guy's skin looks like skin. Right is how same file looks in photoshop, where skin looks like tomato. I can kind of fix photoshop by fiddling with the gamma under exposure but this means editing every photo twice. Ideas?

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Adobe
Community Expert ,
Aug 29, 2023 Aug 29, 2023

How are you getting the raw file into Photoshop?  Opening straight into Photoshop?  Bridge first?  Lightroom first?

George F, Photographer & Forum Volunteer
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Community Expert ,
Aug 29, 2023 Aug 29, 2023

This has to be a monitor profile issue. The profile is defective, the wrong one, or not used at all.

 

What is the system monitor profile, and where does it come from? Are you using a calibrator to make it, or is it just the default profile?

 

What type of display does this machine have? Is it a traditional standard gamut display, or a newer wide gamut ("P3") display? I'm not familiar with Mac models, but if you give us year and model, someone will probably know.

 

Finally - it's not the problem here, but I would not recommend using Apple RGB. It's obsolete and nobody uses it anymore. Use a current standard profile - sRGB, Adobe RGB or ProPhoto.

 

(In the Mac community the current preference seems to be Image P3, which I would also not recommend for the simple reason it's identical to the default monitor profile. That effectively turns off all color management and can potentially lead to other problems).

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New Here ,
Aug 29, 2023 Aug 29, 2023
I open the raw file by double clicking on it in finder.

I'm positive that it's some kind of monitor issue as the issue started when
the tech guys replaced the monitor. They refuse to calibrate it and give me
strange looks when I ask them about monitor calbration. The monitor is a
Viewsonic VA2359. Colour profile listed under Displays is VA2359 series.
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Community Expert ,
Aug 29, 2023 Aug 29, 2023

OK, that reinforces my suspicions. That profile is not good. Defective manufacturer profiles is a big problem, mostly on the Windows side because these profiles are often distriuted through Windows Update. But hook an external display to a Mac, and you often get the same problem.

 

I googled that display to see what type it is. Viewsonic don't say - but as far as I know 23 inch 1920 x 1080 panels were only ever produced as standard gamut. No wide gamut 23 inch panels were made by anyone. So we can assume this is a standard gamut display ("sRGB").

 

Here we need to keep in mind the basic job of the monitor profile. It needs to be an accurate description of the display's actual and current behavior. The profile is a map, and like any map it needs to correspond to the actual terrain. A color managed application uses this map to convert the numbers sent to screen, thus representing the file correctly.

 

That's why you use a calibrator to get an accurate profile. It measures the display after the calibration is finished, and builds a profile based on that measurement. The profile has much higher precision than the calibration alone.

 

If you don't have a calibrator, you use the profile that most closely matches the display's color space. In this case, we can assume that's sRGB IEC61966-2.1. So try to set that as system default.

 

It should be clear that a calibrator is the proper way to deal with this (and I'm fairly confident that would fix this). But a reasonably close profile is better than a broken one.

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New Here ,
Aug 29, 2023 Aug 29, 2023

As an update, switching the colour profile to adobe rgb appears to have solved teh problem. Thanks

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Community Expert ,
Aug 29, 2023 Aug 29, 2023
LATEST

The issue may still be a defective monitor profile. All color management requires two profiles, and one bad profile will cause the conversion to fail. Even though the destination (monitor profile) is the same, if the sources are different, the conversion, the actual math, is different. So it may work with one and fail with the other.

 

Anyway, you shouldn't use Apple RGB, so for now the problem is solved. But consider getting a calibrator.

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